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Consolidating four external backup hard drives into one Drobo 5C

In this review, I’m going to share with you my experience in taking 4 external backup drives, removing them from their housings and putting them into the Drobo 5c for the purpose of backups. The Drobo 5C is a 5 bay USB 3 Raid from Drobo. I’m using it with an iMac running Mojave.

Combing your backup disks into a single unit

So why am I putting my separate drives into a Drobo 5C? The first and most important reason for me is to create a backup system that I can have confidence in. By using my 4 separate USB drives combined together with Time Machine did provide me the storage space, but what happens if one drive fails? What happens is that I’ve lost my entire backup! By combining them into the Drobo 5C, I’m getting storage space and if one drive fails, I can replace the bad drive and the 5C will rebuild itself while maintaining my backup. What’s the cost? Storage space. I do lose some storage space due to the added protection that the Drobo system provides. To see how that works you can go here to the Drobo Capacity Calculator and drag and drop the drives you have into the Drobo you have and see how much storage space you’ll have available. It is possible with the Drobo 5C to have it use 2 drives to protect the backup if I want. And another big reason for me is that as my system grows and I need more backup, I can remove a drive and replace it with a larger drive and the Drobo 5C will rebuild the backup for me using the larger drive. So I can expand the system as I need to over time. One note is that the drives need to be 3.5″ SATA and you’ll need two drives to have the safety factor active.

Setting it up

The Drobo 5c comes nicely packaged and is easy to assemble. The only complaint I have, and this is true of most manufacturers, is that the USB C to USB A cable is too short. I would have liked to have it comes with a longer cable so I have more flexibility in placing the drive relative to the computer. In the initial setup, the 5C wouldn’t power up and I realized that I needed to really seat the power cord into the power brick. Once I did that, everything worked fine.

Next, I went to the Drobo website and found the step by step walkthrough. It walked me through the steps to get everything installed and working correctly. You’ll find that here. So here’s a quick overview of the process.

Select your language

Select your Drobo – 5C

Am I migrating – they walk you through this as well

Insert all your drives into the 5C – you need to have at least 2

Connect your USB-C cable to the 5C

Connect the power cable to the 5C and power it up

Download the Drobo Dashboard and install it and run it

Register it with Drobo – You can skip this step and do it later

Let the Drobo initialize – download the latest firmware, etc.

Following the prompts, format the Drobo

You’re ready to go!

Registration Issues

When I first started up the Drobo Dashboard it asked me to Register the drive, but I needed to create an account to do that, so I went to the Drobo website to create one. In the process, they were supposed to send me a verification email, but that never arrived. After checking my Spam folder and not finding it, I went back to the website and used the ‘I forgot the password’ option and they did send me a password reset email, which I was then able to create to access my account. Even after doing that, I wasn’t able to automatically register the drive. I contacted support about the issue. They quickly responded and asked me to send the serial number information and registered it for me. Support was very responsive.

Adding and removing drives

When you are wanting to add or remove drives from the Drobo, don’t just pop a bunch out, remove them one at a time. I found using the Drobo Dashboard the most straight forward way of doing this. Remove a drive and wait until the Dashboard tells you to add a drive. This way the Drobo will have the time it needs to update and adjust everything. You can also use the lights on the front of the Drobo 5C to do the same thing. I just found the Dashboard more to my liking.

How’s it working so far?

So I have everything installed and working. I’ve set up the Drobo 5C to send me emails notification if there is a problem and I’m doing my first backup to the Drobo 5C and it is working great. I will continue to use this over the coming months and will report back to you on how it’s working for me. Also, Drobo sent me the Drobo 5C for review.

Thanks for reading and I hope you found this article helpful!

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Chris Anson is a photographer, videographer and FAA Part 107 drone pilot/camera operator working with media companies and individuals as well as producing his own stock photographs and videos. Chris loves to share what he knows and continues to learn and explore.

One of the things you need to be careful with when using old external drives is to check their rotation speed. Cheap drives are often 5400 RPM or slower. You should try to get drives that are 7200 RPM. You can get faster at 10K and 15K but they are prohibitively expensive. If you’re not sure, if the drive doesn’t list as 7200 RPM, it probably isn’t.

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